LiveU: Euronews use case

Euronews relies on LiveU to offer innovative live global news coverage in a cost-effective way

Euronews, the number one European news channel, is watched daily by 52 million TV viewers and digital consumers. Euronews offers a unique perspective on world events; empowering viewers to make up their own mind by delivering factual analysis and a diversity of viewpoints.

Budget constraints

Since its foundation in 1993, Euronews has steadily tried to produce independently a growing amount of content, attempting to reduce the volume of its third-party production acquisitions. But this activity suffered from budget constraints given the enormous production costs involved.

Enter LiveU.

Almost four years ago, Euronews started using LiveU products and solutions. Laurent de Rodez, responsible for production and post-production at Euronews, remembers how:

"We started by putting LiveU servers in strategic places, then we acquired a LU500 transmission unit for our camera crew in Brussels and an LU220 encoder for our outdoors live sets, enabling us to provide live coverage far more cost-effectively. The added strength of LiveU is its global presence, almost universal. Only LiveU allows us to work with independent camera crews the world over. Whenever we want to hire a team, the first question we ask is: "have you got LiveU?". LiveU has quickly become the enabler for fast video delivery to Euronews by its network of independent partners.

Connecting with NBC News

Then, when NBC News became a Euronews shareholder in 2017, the two channels realized they were both using LiveU products: "We now use LiveU Central continuously to exchange video files between the NBC Washington office, the Euronews office in Lyon and the Euronews World office in London", says Mr. de Rodez.

Latest news

One of the solutions Euronews also relies on is LU-Smart*, LiveU’s mobile app for smartphones and tablets which has been revolutionizing the way they do news reporting for a while. From now on, a single journalist can now do everything by him/herself with their smartphone and the LU-Smart app.

This excellent LU-Smart experience has convinced Euronews to shift their entire news organization: they now train all their journalists on how to use LU-Smart on their smartphone and supply them with a "reporting kit". This kit includes a pocket size router (so that they can bond a second cellular connection whenever necessary), a secondary phone which transmits audio return from the studio, and a good, iPhone-compatible, microphone.

Nevertheless, the secondary router is less and less needed, given the mobile networks speed improvements. Thanks to LU-Smart's performance, it is most of the times possible to rely on the main smartphone's single 4G connection.

Results

As Laurent de Rodez puts it: "Today we do an average of 10 lives a day with LU-Smart, and 80% of our local correspondents' live reports are produced with this solution – and we intend to scale up! We can say, in economic terms, the LU-Smart solution is perfect, very flexible; it allows us to keep our studio and technical platform while still making a good broadcast quality adaptation at the cost of a smartphone. Also, from a journalist's perspective, the smartphone offers greater proximity with the people you interview, and it makes it possible to react quickly, without being dependent on the equipment and connectivity available locally."

It's the future!"The LU-Smart solution is a big trend for news reporting: lightweight and cheap equipment, good enough for stand-up news reporting. We believe it's the future.” concluded Laurent de Rodez.

* LU-Smart is a mobile app which offers the very latest in bonded transmission technology for smartphones, enabling any mobile journalist to cover live HD news from the field using their own mobile device.